BLACK PAPER ALBUM by Karen Schulte

Karen Schulte’s vividly detailed and heartfelt poems capture “the crumbling edges” of life always in motion, forever “coming apart,” like treasured family photos held together by string around an old “black paper album.” She depicts how old photos, like old memories, can’t hold, meanings shift “no longer attached to time or place.” One’s identity is a “shifting thing,” reduced in the perspective of anti-Semitic bigotry, magnified in the perspective of love, reshaped by large and changing cultural and natural forces. She aptly reveals how old family photos offer important, beguiling “clue[s]” to deeper essences of identity and relationships that can never be fully accessed. Regardless, what matters most, as Schulte helps us appreciate, is “for a while, we were,” “where [our] presence was valued.”
–Gayl Teller, Author of Flashlight: New and Selected Poems (Cherry Grove/ WordTech, 2019, Nassau County Poet Laureate 2009-11, Walt Whitman Birthplace Poet of the Year for 2016

Karen Schulte’s Black Paper Album is poignant, mysterious, revelatory, and illuminated with love.  From a disintegrating photo album, the poet reconstructs lives and roots of family lore. The poet’s vivid poetry, rich with sense details, preserves family history for the future as she rescues the order of photos on acid-free paper.  Picture taking becomes an art in the hands of her father’s loving eye as he captures the three year old poet and her grandfather in “Rembrandt’s Camera.  The child’s face is hidden by a bonnet and her grandfather’s smile is stopped short, but all is illuminated in the beauty of “sitting peacefully.’  The child in the photos grows, losses a young friend to an early death, takes dance lessons, becomes a woman in a red taffeta dress.  The final poem, “Fault Lines” recapitulates the poet’s growth in time and understanding.  Schulte recognizes all the “fault lines” merge in her “leaving traces of lost causes, old griefs/whose shadows stretch long and everlasting.”  Family bloodlines, family hopes, family love unite in these poems through memories engendered by salvaged portraits of the past.

–Virginia Walker, Ph.D.,  taught writing and literature at New England and Long Island colleges.  She has curated six Webinars on poets and poetry for the Shelter Island Library, NY and is the co-author of the poetry book Neuron Mirror (with Michael Walsh}.  Her poems have appeared in Nassau Review, Minutia Review, Light of the City and Sea, Touched by Eros, Bards Annual, Poets 4 Paris, Suffolk Co. Poetry Review, and the Humanist.

In this compilation of poetry, Schulte demonstrates an impressive talent for creating an artistic conversational line of poetry packed with poetic skill, including the  musicality of her line, precise diction, and excellent skills to intuitively know the  accurate visual architecture for the poem on page.  Her book takes you on a poetic journey inspired by an aged album of the poet’s family photographs.  The honesty in these poems unlocks the private experience and becomes the universal. With restrained urgency to tell her truth, she elevates these poems to to become sacred writings of our own human families.  I encourage you to add Black Paper  Album to your bookshelf.